Erring on waste

As a
Christmas subscriber, I have both praise and criticism for three
recent articles about nuclear waste in the West.

In the Dec. 18, 2000, issue, Oakley Brooks
authored a short but commendable piece called "Agency gets
rebuked," in which he unearthed a rather obscure report critical of
the Department of Energy's long-term plan for dealing with legacy
waste. He even managed to interview two of the study's authors.

However, the very next issue (HCN, 1/15/01) saw
HCN stumble not once, but twice, in reporting
two separate stories on the former nuclear weapons plant, Rocky
Flats.

Paul Larmer got several things wrong in
his review of Making a Real Killing, by Len
Ackland. He states that nuclear bomb facilities, such as Rocky
Flats, cost "tens of millions of dollars a year to clean up," a
gross understatement. In 2001, DOE will spend $650 million at Rocky
Flats alone, and over $6 billion at nuclear sites nationwide.

Also, his statement, "Rocky Flats was built and
operated before we knew how to handle nuclear and toxic waste,"
implies that we have since learned the lesson. In fact, anyone who
has kept abreast of recent incidents, in which Rocky Flats cleanup
workers were exposed to plutonium, would know that we still haven't
figured out how to handle fissile materials safely.

Finally, I had to wonder if Larmer had really
read the book when he claimed the 1969 fire, which he likened to
Chernobyl, was one of "dozens of equally dangerous situations and
events which the public never knew about." I have read it, and
although Ackland reports that the '69 fire was indeed a close shave
for nearby metropolitan Denver, the copy I read was oddly missing
11 of the 12 other near catastrophes, the lone exception being a
1957 fire that actually resulted in significant off-site
contamination.

To add insult to injury,
Catherine Lutz was guilty of exaggeration in her two-page spread
("Hot Property") chronicling the so-called Rocky Flats "turf war."
She maintains that Rocky Flats, in its day, produced "thousands of
tons of hazardous waste on a daily basis." The reality, many
thousands of tons produced over 40 years of operation, needs no
embellishing. What's worse, the article's main premise, that Rocky
Flats is in imminent danger of being developed, simply is not true.
All indications are that the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge Act enjoys
widespread, local support - enough to ensure the signature of a
states' rights, pro-development president.

To
be fair, I only noticed these errors because I work for an
organization that oversees the cleanup of Rocky Flats. Even so,
given its discriminating readership, HCN can
afford few such error-prone issues.